I positively enjoy movies, but do movies positively enjoy me?
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Fifty Shades of Grey 2015
this review isn't of fifty shades of grey, which i haven't seen, but of the new testament instead
isn't it mad that when the new testament dropped after the "old testament" had served as the hebrew bible for several hundred / a thousand years already, it would have been considered the craziest most radical sequel ever. like people would buy a copy being like "yooo i can't wait to find out what happens to my fella moses" or "damn that…
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Valhalla Rising 2009
So good that it's made me instantly change my top 4 on first viewing, Nicolas Winding Refn's Valhalla Rising is perhaps the ultimate "Scottish film" (in fact being neither Scottish nor British nor American but an exclusively Danish production, filmed in Scotland with mainly Scottish actors), for its physical feel and terrain but also for the conversations it invites on Scottishness. It is one of very few among my 5/5 films that deserves that rating for not one but both…
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Monster 2023
Although this is the first time Kore-eda has adapted a screenplay from someone other than himself since the 90s, Monster slots perfectly into the Japanese director's filmography as a slightly Rashomon-esque tale about not judging another person before you've walked a mile in their shoes that brims with life and empathy. His susceptibility to the mawkish - something that I've in the past thought the Cannes jury showed much greater lenience towards than they would in the case of a…
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Mickey 17 2025
Camusian absurdism and the future as a platform to understand colonialist enclosure in Bong Joon-ho's Mickey 17
Another Bong hit!
"We must imagine Sisyphus happy", is Albert Camus's radical conclusion to the existential punishment meted out unto the Greek tragic figure. The ultimate absurd figure, Sisyphus is at the centre of the French philosopher's worldview, which accepts human existence as ultimately meaningless and still rejects suicide, arguing that it's precisely in the meaninglessness of things that joy can be found.…
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Baby Reindeer 2024
Right, hold on, gotta get my contrarian's hat back out of the box for this one. One second, here we go.
Two main problems I had with this. First is the lack of any kind of creative formal approach, which is not the be all and end all and certainly not unusual for a streaming production, but it means that the miniseries rises and falls on the basis of its discursive elements. Which is the bigger of my two issues,…
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Great Freedom 2021
I tend to be wary of dramas about historical injustices and discrimination for how they all too easily and frequently fall in either of two categories: focussing on how horrible the past was to allow the viewer to pat themselves on the back for how far society has come and absolve them of engaging with present-day issues, or, reversely, grasping at flimsy similarities between past and present in the service of blunt political commentary.
Sebastian Meise’s latest - titled, with…
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